Journal of Integrated Social Sciences
www.JISS.org, 2015 - 5(1): 58-62
Commentary:
A FUNDAMENTAL DISAGREEMENT ABOUT THE
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR, OR:
THE SITUATION MADE HIM WRITE IT
Seth A. Wagerman, Ph.D.
Abstract
Berry (2015) argues in his article “Explanations and Implications of the Fundamental
Attribution Error: A Review and Proposal” (see this present issue of JISS) that (1) the
occurrence of the FAE has potentially harmful implications, (2) explanations of its
occurrence may be unified under the idea that it is caused by hypersensitive agency
detectors in the mind (HADD), and (3) its effects may be mitigated by education and proper
training. It is argued here that each of these points are brought into question by whether or
not the FAE actually works in the way people believe it does, whether it in fact works at
all, and whether or not thinking about behavior in terms of a person-situation dichotomy is
even fruitful.
Keywords: Attribution, attribution error, correspondence bias,
social psychology, situationism, personality
psychology, person-situation dichotomy
__________________
AUTHOR NOTE: Please address all correspondence to Dr. Seth Wagerman, 6525 Twin Circle Lane, Simi Valley, CA
93063, USA. Email: [email protected]
© 2015 Journal of Integrated Social Sciences
Wagerman
Commentary on "The Fundamental Attribution Error”
COMMENTARY
I’ve never been a great fan of the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE). This is at
least partly because I’m a personality psychologist; social psychologists seem to put a great
deal of stock in it, as it supports the general proposition that situations are more important
sources of behavioral variance than are traits. However, empirical evidence in support of
the FAE is scarcer than we’re generally led to believe (see Funder, 1982; Kreuger &
Funder, 2004; Funder & Fast, 2010) and there is even reason to believe that the
phenomenon may operate in the opposite direction, entirely.
For example, Ross’ (1977) “false consensus bias” suggests that people over - rather
than under - attribute behavior to environmental factors. Quattrone (1982) asked his
participants to rate situational impact on the essay topics of authors (who had, in reality,
been free to choose), standing traditional FAE methodology on its head. By drawing
attention to the salience of situations (rather than to attitudes), he found that participants
tended to explain behavior in terms of external forces rather than internal - thus reversing
the usual outcome.
I’m not sure the FAE is even “fundamental,” and I’m not alone in this (see, e.g.,
Sabini, Seipmann, & Stein, 2001). My most direct objection to the “fundamental” nature
of the FAE is described best by Funder & Fast (2010): how successful, they ask, are our
attempts to change a friends’ political standpoint, a spouse’s dishwashing habits, or a
child’s clinginess? And how successful are governmental programs aimed at rehabilitating
undesirable behaviors such as drug abuse, violent tendencies, or drunk driving? In all
cases, the answer is: not as successful as we imagine when we make the attempt (or fund
the program). It can easily be argued that we overestimate the power of external factors to
alter behavior - dispositions actually being quite powerful (and frequently inflexible).
To be clear, then, I’m not disagreeing with Berry’s (2015; see this issue of JISS)
summary of the FAE so much as I have always been dubious about the construct itself
(indeed, I cannot blame the author for anything stated in his article; I can only assume that
the situation made him write it!). Whether or not understanding the FAE and its
implications is actually “important” in any real sense is up for debate. As it happens, I have
personally seen friendships end over the FAE; in graduate school, one doctoral student
made a complaint about a colleague’s behavior, and another doctoral student accused them
of committing the FAE. The first turned on their heel and left, wounded, and the two
haven’t spoken since.
This example is clearly of the N = 1 anecdotal sort, and in a tongue-in-cheek way,
serves to support Berry’s assertion that “the FAE affects relationships” (p. 52). But it is
also possibly the best example of a real-life negative outcome of the FAE given in this
volume - though the umbrage arose not as an outcome of the FAE itself but rather from a
hypersensitive understanding of the implied insult in its application. This experience also
suggests that neither properly educating people on the topic (Berry’s suggestion, p. 52) nor
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Wagerman
Commentary on "The Fundamental Attribution Error”
increasing attributional complexity (p. 53) may have the ameliorative effects the author
hopes for (assuming we’re willing to agree that doctoral students in Social Psychology are
likely to be a) relatively educated on the topic and b) relatively complex, attributionally).
Berry’s paper is in main a brisk summary of the properties and consequences of the
FAE, but I would be remiss in not mentioning the novel portion of it, which is the proposal
that the phenomenon be understood in terms of a higher level cognitive function, the
HADD. Because my criticism is with the FAE itself, I have no particular quarrel with
thinking about it in those terms, although I am always uncertain, in general, as to whether
or not ascribing the mechanism of function for an already intangible theoretical construct
to another intangible theoretical construct goes a long way in illuminating things. To his
credit, Berry does suggest that the HADD be examined empirically before being given too
much weight as an explanatory tool, and I will be interested to follow along and see what
the results of those studies reveal. But as long as we’re making educated guesses, I’d like
to take a stab at it as well: the FAE, to the degree that it exists, may simply be a function
of the availability heuristic. That is, we have more instances available of people doing
things than of nebulous situational properties doing things. How many times have we seen
or heard about a car wrapped around a telephone pole because the driver was texting, or
drunk, or fell asleep at the wheel? Compare this to the number of times we’ve seen or heard
an explanation in which the situation was such that any person would have no choice but
to do the same and wrap their car around the pole as well! My explanation is certainly no
more empirically supported than Berry’s, but it does have the benefit of cleaving a bit
closer to Occam’s Razor.
Probably the largest problem, in my opinion, in spending effort understanding the
FAE is that it represents a dangerous sort of oversimplification. Firstly, it is an
oversimplification in that people probably do some more sophisticated thinking than the
FAE acknowledges when it comes to making attributional inferences (Gawronski, 2004).
McClure (1998), for example, proposes that people generally recognize that their behavior
can be (and frequently is) multiply determined, and Reeder (2009) suggests that people
take higher level states such as intention and motive into consideration when making
dispositional attributions.
But more importantly, it is less profitable, frankly, to treat dispositions and
situations as though they are competing forces in understanding human behavior than it is
to recognize that the two imply one another and interact almost inseparably on most
occasions. Take, for example, traditionally competing explanations for why a driver has
just cut you off on the freeway: the dispositional attribution (“because (s)he is an aggressive
driver”) is not inseparable from situational aspects about the conditions of the road or other
drivers on it that would provoke behaviors perceived by some as aggressive. Likewise, the
situational attribution (“because (s)he was late for work”) also intrinsically implies
something dispositional, because not everyone will respond to lateness the same way; my
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wife never breaks speed laws, regardless of hurry, whereas I get very anxious about being
late and am much more likely to worry and therefore, rush.
The point, then, is that Kurt Lewin had it right in his (1936) proposal that
understanding behavior requires knowledge of both the person and the situation. In fact,
if we look at persons, situations, and behaviors as part of a triad of sorts (Funder, 2001;
2006), it becomes equally true that if we want to understand people we need to know
something about both behaviors and situations, and that if we want to understand situations,
we need to know something about both persons and behaviors. In other words, persons
and situations interact in such a way that viewing them separately paints an incomplete
picture and is ultimately unfruitful.
REFERENCES
Berry, Z. (2015). Explanations and implications of the fundamental attribution error: A
review and proposal. Journal of Integrated Social Sciences, 5(1), 44-57.
Funder, D.C. (1982). On the accuracy of dispositional vs. situational attributions. Social
Cognition, 1, 205-222.
Funder, D.C. (2001). The really, really fundamental attribution error. Psychological
Inquiry, 12, 21-23.
Funder, D. C. (2006). Towards a resolution of the personality triad: Persons, situations, and
behaviors. Journal for Research in Personality, 40(1), 21-34.
Funder, D.C., & Fast, L.A. (2010). Personality in social psychology. In D. Gilbert & S.
Fiske (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed.), pp. 668-697. New York:
Wiley.
Gawronski, B. (2004). Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The
fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European
Review of Social Psychology, 15, 183-217.
Krueger, J. I., & Funder, D. C. (2004). Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes,
consequences and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and
cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(3), 361-367.
Lewin (1936). Principles of topographical psychology. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
McClure, J. (1998). Discounting causes of behavior: Are two reasons better than
one? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(1), 7–20.
Quattrone, G.A. (1982). Overattribution and unit formation: When behavior engulfs the
person. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 593-607.
Reeder, G. D. (2009). Mindreading: Judgments about intentionality and motives in
dispositional inference. Psychological Inquiry, 20, 1–18.
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Commentary on "The Fundamental Attribution Error”
Ross, L. (1977). The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and
attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301.
Sabini, J., Siepmann, M., and Stein, J. (2001). The really fundamental attribution error in
social psychological research. Psychological Inquiry, 12(1), 1-15.
AUTHOR INFORMATION:
Seth A. Wagerman, Ph.D., is a personality and social psychologist whose research
interests lie at the intersection of persons, situations, and behaviors - as well as the teaching
of psychology. Address: Dr. Seth Wagerman, 6525 Twin Circle Lane, Simi Valley, CA
93063, USA. Email: [email protected]
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